POP CULTURE STUDIES TURNS 25 | PAGE 1, 2, 3
- - - - - - - - - -

Popular culture studies rapidly grew in size and notoriety. And BGSU's eight-member faculty now teaches at least 2,000 students a year. Eventually, it set up shop in an uncannily appropriate house built from a 1930s Montgomery Ward kit. The department was also distinguished by its high profile in national and even international media attention.

"Some people were delighted by that and some people were embarrassed by that," says Michael Marsden, who worked with Browne at the outset and is now dean of liberal arts at Northern Michigan University.

Marsden suffered his share of knocks as a popular culture scholar. After being barraged with faculty criticism when he became a certified Miss Ohio judge, in order to get "privileged information" for his research on beauty pageants, he fought back. "I'll file a grievance if you're suggesting there's some aspect of culture that's forbidden to be studied," he said.

A conference on "the history of roller coasters" at Ohio's famed Cedar Point amusement park garnered accusations that scholars were "squandering taxpayer money and doing foolish things," recalls Marsden. Two decades later, "that roller coaster course" is still cited by critics knocking the Bowling Green program.

Yet such criticism still leaves pop culture scholars nonplused. Why should the study of a leisure activity necessarily be a leisurely activity itself? Department veterans like Professor Christopher Geist say popular culture's more outrageous, perhaps publicity-seeking past has cast an undeservedly anti-intellectual image.

While the ever-rebellious Browne still asserts, "I have never come across something that I find worthless," Geist demurs: "I'm not at all afraid to say some TV rots the brain, but I want to understand why people are drawn to it."

Given crisscrossing paths of intellectual discovery, given the rise first of American studies, then mass media studies and, more recently, "cultural studies," it's tough to know how much of pop culture in academia was spurred by BGSU's program. But sometimes the effect is obvious. In the 1980s, Robert Thompson, a graduate student at Northwestern University, wrote a paper analyzing the appeal of top TV programs that is a model of pop culture scholarship. Drawing from studies that concluded that television viewing is characterized by inattention (up to two-thirds of viewers are engaged in other activities while watching), Thompson analyzed then-top-rated shows like "The Love Boat" and found that they appealed to their distracted viewers with lots of short scenes and reiterated exposition: "A moment's viewing at any time -- is enough to get a summary and an update."

As he concluded: "All the things that make these shows appear inartistic -- superficial themes, limited character development, low intellectual demand -- are really their strong points."

Thompson's paper "'The Love Boat': High Art on the High Seas," not only predicted the mega-popularity of multi-plot micro-scene shows like "ER" and "Seinfeld," it launched his career as a pop culture scholar when it was published in Browne's Journal of American Culture in 1983.

Looking back over 15 annual conferences of the Popular Culture Association he's attended, Thompson says: "There was room for fans, aficionados and lunatics. To put it bluntly -- it was more open and exciting intellectually than most of the established, traditional fields."

Earning his doctorate in TV studies, Thompson founded the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "I really want to do to TV what English professors did to novels," he says. "I want to engage our culture of choice, popular culture, television, with the same sincerity and seriousness."

N E X T_ P A G E .|. A love-hate relationship with the media